Saturday, May 12, 2012

I saw this and I went WHOA! I cannot seem to take my eyes away from it, but I'm going to try because I want to take a nice long hot bubble bath. Hmmm, what is that I spy -- the same hand action going on with the "conjurer" as in the "pointing Queen" paintings and sculptures (including chess pieces) of old??? Well, pretty obvious, as is the use of shades of black, white and red. At least one eight-pointed star, the old Egyptian-style "checkerboard", diamonds (always a girl's best friend and just a cockeyed checkerboard -- one of the first symbols ever put on colored pottery about 8,000 years or so ago, in the highlands of the Iranian plateau), a modified swastiska and a crux, birds galore including doves, the ancient symbol for Sophia (Wisdom) and later on, the Virgin Mother Mary...or are those "tongues of fire?" A four-armed monkey - Mr. Don is the expert on Hanuman. A pyramid, an altar, and what is that furry creature underneath (or inside of) the altar? Could that possibly be the Trickster himself, a Raccoon? Speaking of which, I chased one up a tree earlier this evening...

I'm sure the longer I look at this painting, the more I'll see! Here are the particulars:

Chessbase has a report:Top seed Khotenashvili wins Georgian Women Championship12.05.2012– After eight rounds WIM Meri Arabidze, rated 2337, was in the lead, a full point ahead of top seed Bela Khotenashvili, 2490. In round nine the two clashed and Bela beat Meri, who went on to draw and then lose a game. Bela on the other hand won and drew, so that on the final scoreboard she was the sole winner and 2012 Georgian Women's Champion. Player portraits by WIM Sopho Nikoladze.

IM Salome Melia, 2012 Georgian Women's Chess Championship

Our favorite Georgian player, IM Salome Melia (2400), finished in 5th place overall with 5.5/11, where the lowest rated player scored five draws and two wins for a score of 4.5! A tough field. Here is the final cross-table:

Baginskaite still scoreless after 4 rounds. She lost to the lowest rated player in the event. This is not the Baginskaite we've seen in prior championships. Don't know what's going on, but something is definitely out of kilter.

Wondering, could these air-borne ball games be descendants of ancient games that were etched out and played on the ground, taken up off the board, so to speak? Notice also the symbolic cross-over between this ball game and symbols of the after-life as in Senet and perhaps the even older Mehen.
From Live Science
Ballplayer Statue Suggests Sports Were Big in Ancient Mexico

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 11 May 2012 Time: 11:44 AM ET

Sports may have been all the rage for ancient Mesoamericans, scientists say after discovering a portion of a figurine of an athlete near Oaxaca, Mexico.

The figure indicates the activity known as "the ballgame" was even more widespread than thought in Mesoamerica, which extended from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Partial ballpayer figurine.

The partial figurine shows about 2 inches (5 centimeters) of a male ballplayer's chest. The head and legs have been broken off. It seems to be wearing a ballgame costume, including a wide belt covering the abdomen and an elaborate mirrored collar like those worn by other examples of ballplayers known from other areas of Mesoamerica.

"Because the ballgame is associated with the rise of complex societies, understanding its origins also illuminates the evolution of socio-politically complex societies," study author Jeffrey Blomster of the George Washington University said in a statement. "Exploring the origins and spread of the ballgame is central to understanding the development of the Mesoamerican civilization."

The Mesoamerican ballgame was played in large courts, and involved tossing or hitting a ball — usually with one's hips, though other body parts and even rackets may have been allowed — through a circular hole several feet up and sticking out from a vertical wall (think of abasketball hoop-rim turned on its side). It's been played since 1400 B.C. by people in ancient Mexico and Central America.

According to Blomster, the games and the costumes or uniforms worn by participants were tied to themes of life and death, mortals and underworld deities, or were symbols of the sun and moon. In some instances, the ballcourt itself represented a portal to the underworld.

Ballgame evidence from other areas of Mesoameria indicates that the ballgame developed during the Early Horizon period, sometime between 1700 B.C. and 1400 B.C. The area around the newly discovered figurine was dated using carbon isotopes (elements with a different number of neutrons) to between 1399 B.C. and 899 B.C.

"We know there were earlier versions of a ballgame prior to the Early Horizon with both a ballcourt and rubber balls found in coastal Chiapas and the Gulf Coast, but the institutionalized version of the ballgame, a hallmark of Mesoamerican civilizations, developed during the Early Horizon," Blomster said.

For instance, a Mayan artifact shaped like a monkey skull that was reported in 2011 is thought to be a hand guard used for such a ballgame. This artifact, however, seemed to be for use in the afterlife, placed in a tomb between A.D. 250 and 600.

Before the discovery of the figurine remnant, researchers didn't think the ballgame had infiltrated these areas of Mexico inhabited by the Mixtec people during that time. "While there has been some limited evidence about the participation of the nearby Valley of Oaxaca [in southern Mexico] in the ballgame, the Mixteca has largely been written off in terms of involvement in the origins of complex society in ancient Mexico," Blomster said.

"This discovery re-emphasizes how the ancient Mixtecs were active participants in larger Mesoamerican phenomenon," he said.

The research is detailed in the May 7 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Archaeologists working at the Xultun
ruins of the Mayan civilisation have reported striking finds, including the
oldest-known Mayan astronomical tables.

The site, in Guatemala, includes the first known instance of Mayan art
painted on the walls of a dwelling.

A report in Science says it dates from the early 9th Century, pre-dating
other Mayan calendars by centuries. Such calendars rose to prominence recently amid claims they predicted the end
of the world in 2012.

The Mayan civilisation occupied Central America from about 2000BC until its
decline and assimilation following the colonisation by the Spanish from the 15th
Century onwards. It still holds fascination, with many early Mayan sites still
hidden or uncatalogued.

The ruins at Xultun were first discovered in 1912 and mapping efforts in the
1920s and 1970s laid out much of the site's structure.

Archaeologists have catalogued the site's features, including a 35m-tall
pyramid, but thousands of structures on the 30 sq km site remain unexplored.

In 2010, one of Dr Saturno's students was following the tracks of more recent
looters at Xultun when he discovered the vegetation-covered structure that has
now been excavated.

When Mayans renovated an old structure, they typically collapsed its roof and
built on top of the rubble. But for some reason, the new Xultun find had been
filled in through its doorway, with the roof left intact.

Dr Saturno, who is now based at Boston University, explained that despite it
being under just a metre of soil today, that served to preserve the site after
more than a millennium of rainy seasons, insect traffic and encroaching plant
and tree roots.

"We found that three of the room's four walls were well preserved and that
the ceilings were also in good shape in terms of the paintings on them, so we
got an awful lot more than we bargained for," he said.

'Different mindset'

The excavation was carried out using grants from the National Geographic
Society, which has prepared a
high-resolution photographic tour of the room. It measures about 2m on each side with a 3m, vaulted ceiling, and is
dominated by a stone bench, suggesting the room was a meeting place.

The east wall features a number of seated figures, nearly life-sized, dressed
in black and wearing elaborate headdresses similar to a bishop's mitre.

They all look toward the north wall, on which a more elaborately dressed
figure in orange holds a stylus in a hand outstretched toward a figure that Dr
Saturno believes represented the king of Xultun.

"The seated figures that we see around them are involved in some narrative in
which the king is being portrayed impersonating a Mayan deity and these guys are
in attendance at that impersonation," Dr Saturno explained.

The relevance of the figure with the stylus seems clear: "We think this room
was used as a writing room, that it's part of a complex associated with the work
being done by Maya scribes."

Perhaps most intriguing among the finds were several finds related to
astronomical tables, including four long numbers on the east wall that represent
a cycle lasting up to 2.5 million days.

The east wall is mostly covered by tabulations of black symbols or "glyphs"
that map out various astronomical cycles: that of Mars and Venus and the lunar
eclipses.

The astronomical cycles and corrections were used to predict lunar eclipses far
into the future

The wall also features red marks that appear to be notes and corrections to
the calculations; Dr. Saturno said that the scribes "seem to be using it like a
blackboard".

The Xultun find is the first place that all of the cycles have been found
tied mathematically together in one place, representing a calendar that
stretches more than 7,000 years into the future.

The Mayan numbering system for dates is a complex one in base-18 and base-20
numbers that, in modern-day terms, would "turn over" at the end of 2012.

But Dr Saturno points out that the new finds serve to further undermine the
fallacy that this is tantamount to a prediction of the end of the world.

"The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from
now, things would be exactly like this," he said. "We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that
nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."

Archaeologists have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace.

The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ – mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world’s first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.

Evidence of the long-lost language - probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran – was found by a Cambridge University archaeologist as he deciphered an ancient clay writing tablet unearthed by an international archaeological team excavating an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey.

The tablet revealed the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer programme. But when the Cambridge archaeologist – Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars.

Because ancient Middle Eastern names are normally composites, made-up, in full or abbreviated form, of ordinary words in the relevant local lexicon, the unique nature of the tablet’s 45 mystery names is seen by scholars as evidence of a previously unknown language.

The clay tablet text originally formed part of the palace’s archive – used by local Assyrian imperial officials to record their administrative, political and economic decisions and actions.

The 60 women (including the 45 with evidence of the previously unattested language) were almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving). Indeed the text mentions that some of them were being allocated to specific local villages.

Typical names, borne by the women – the evidence for the lost language – include Ushimanay, Alagahnia, Irsakinna and Bisoonoomay.

Now archaeologists and linguistics experts are set to analyse the mystery names in even greater details to try to discover whether the letter-order or letter frequency shows any similarities to previously attested ancient tongues to which this mystery language could be related.

The 45 women are thought to come from somewhere in the central or northern Zagros Mountains – because that is the only area in which the Assyrians were militarily active at the relevant time where the ancient languages are still largely unknown.

It’s likely that the women were compulsorily moved from their Zagros Mountains homeland and assigned to work near Tushan sometime in the second half of the 8th century BC – probably as a result of conquests carried out in the Zagros by the Assyrian kings Tiglath Pilasser III or Sargon.

The excavation of the palace at Tushan is being carried out by a German archaeological team directed by Dr. Dirk Wicke of Mainz University as part of an archaeological investigation into the ancient Assyrian city led by Professor Timothy Matney of the University of Akron in Ohio. Full details about the discovery of the mystery names are published in the current issue of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies .

In the Solomon Islands, about 10 percent of the dark-skinned indigenous people have strikingly blond hair. Some islanders theorize that the coloring could be a result of excess sun exposure, or a diet rich in fish. [Aren't they all exposed more or less to the same level of sun exposure? And don't they all have more or less the same diet?] Another explanation is that the blondness was inherited from distant ancestors — European traders and explorers who came to the islands. [A possible and plausible explanation, but now, thanks to DNA, we know the truth of the matter.]

But that’s not the case, researchers now report. The gene variant responsible for blond hair in the islanders is distinctly different from the gene that causes blond hair in Europeans.

“For me it breaks down any kind of simple notions you might have about race,” said Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University. “Humans are beautifully diverse, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Dr. Bustamante and his colleagues published their findings in the current issue of the journal Science. The researcher analyzed saliva samples from more than 1,000 islanders, looking closely at a subset of the samples — from 43 blond and 42 dark-haired islanders.

They were soon able to identify the single gene responsible for the variance in hair color. Called TYRP1, the gene is known to influence pigmentation in humans. The researchers also found that the variant of TYRP1 that causes blond hair in Solomon Islanders is entirely absent in the genomes of Europeans.

“Here you go into an unstudied population with a small sample size and you can really find some cool things,” Dr. Bustamante said. “So what about other places, like what about light pigmentation in parts of Africa? How do we not know the genetic basis of skin and hair pigmentations across the globe?”

He and his team hope to raise more money to further analyze the Solomon Islands data.

What is going on with Baginskaite?
She lost today to a player rated 200 points below her. Is Baginskaite ill? Anna Zatonskih had no business drawing her game today against Foisor. Don't get complacent. Way too early to be doing that! Melekhina continues her slide. It's probably just a matter of time before quits pro chess altogether.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.

Down goes Marie Malchodi, 48, who attended but never graduated from Brown, down to the library’s subterranean warrens, where she works as a “book conservation technician.” She sweeps her long dark hair into a bun, pierces it with a paint brush and starts her day, caring for ancient books and ephemera that are sensitive to the touch.

A few weeks ago, Ms. Malchodi opened yet another leather-bound book, one of more than 300,000 rare volumes in the hold of the John Hay Library. With surgical precision, she turned the pages of a medical text once owned by Solomon Drowne, Class of ’73 (1773, that is). And there, in the back, she found a piece of paper depicting the baptism of Jesus. It was signed:

“P. Revere Sculp”

Ye gods! Had Marie Malchodi, of Cranston, R.I., book conservation technician, just made contact with Paul Revere, of Boston, silversmith? Revere, who knew of the fiery need to share vital information, would have appreciated Ms. Malchodi’s galloping reaction, which was:

“I have to show this to somebody.”

Ms. Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.

One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since — though mostly underground — inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.

In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn’t it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?

A year ago, Ms. Malchodi was assigned to check the condition of thousands of rare books about to be shipped to an off-campus annex. In a basement room made smaller and louder by the air ducts looming from the ceiling, she tended to her task, sitting on a stool set beside a collection of dusty, rolled-up maps, all needing to be vacuumed, and all with titles like “Madeira and Mamore Railway Plan of the Rio Madeira at San Antonio.”

The job sometimes took longer than necessary because of that tendency of hers to get lost in things: illustrations in children’s books, brittle newspaper clippings and, especially, handwritten notes from the long dead. She feels the rush of intimacy as the distance in time collapses.

Now here, on a small cart, were 177 more books, all from the collection of Drowne, a doctor and polymath who distinguished himself during the American Revolution. “Watts’s Logick.” “Kalm’s Travels.” “Plague and Yellow Fever.”

Next up: an 1811 edition of “The Modern Practice of Physic,” by Dr. Robert Thomas, a champion of purgatives as a cure for disease. Ms. Malchodi examined the red leather cover, the gold tooling on the spine. Then she pulled out that piece of paper.

The engraving, titled “Buried With Him By Baptism,” shows John the Baptist raising Jesus from the River Jordan under a blazing sun, while people in vaguely Colonial attire watch from shore. And in the lower right corner appears the name of a Revolutionary icon.

Who knows how long this papery wisp lay hidden in the musty stacks at the century-old Hay Library? In the section reserved for the history of science. Near a microscope and a skull. Across from a copy of Darwin’s monograph on the “subclass Cirripedia” (barnacles, that is).

What Ms. Malchodi knew was that she had to sound the alarm. With some hesitancy — “because I don’t want to bother her” — she approached the raised desk of Rachel Lapkin, a library materials conservator who was immersed in stabilizing the leather of an 18th-century Chinese dictionary.

Ms. Lapkin, who actually enjoys her colleague’s enthusiasm, studied the print and found it fascinating, even bizarre. “I think we should look into that,” she said.

The basement brain trust decided that the print must be shown to Richard Noble, the rare books cataloger, whose office takes some doing to reach. So, with the discovery safely inside Dr. Thomas’s celebration of purgatives, Ms. Malchodi began her journey through an underground labyrinth, carrying the volume as a deacon might carry the Bible.

Out of her basement work space and past some lockers. Past discarded wooden catalog cabinets. Down some steps to the subbasement. Past some metal bookshelves and a “Do Not Remove” sign. Down more steps and through the tunnel that crosses beneath College Street. Up to Mr. Noble’s office, in Cataloging and Acquisitions. Carefully carrying that Revere — if it was a Revere.

And Mr. Noble had stepped away for lunch.

An hour or so later, Ms. Malchodi returned. “She said, ‘I found this,’ and presented it to me with a big smile,” Mr. Noble recalled. “She let me discover what was inside. She let me have that much fun.”

Mr. Noble’s first reaction was to say that the engraving was just crude enough to be a Revere. Then he held the engraving up to the light as a test. It had the faintly ribbed look of paper produced from the slurry pulp made of rags, signaling that it was most likely handmade paper from the 18th century.

Yes. A Revere.

This could very well mean that the patriot — who had nurtured the seeds of rebellion with his engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770 — had cut the scene into a flat copper plate; filled the grooves with ink, perhaps by pressing it in with the palm of his hand; wiped away the excess with circular sweeps of a small cloth; and used a hand-operated press to produce the engraving.

“That was a nice moment,” Mr. Noble said.

It turned out that Ms. Malchodi had uncovered only the fifth known copy of this particular engraving, which is “a bit of a curiosity in Revere’s work,” according to Lauren Hewes, the curator of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. She said that while Revere carefully documented his prosperous and prolific career as an artisan, he made no mention of this piece, and so the exact date of the engraving is unclear.

“It sits outside of what we think of when we think of Paul Revere,” she said. “It wasn’t all patriotic topics — he did a lot more than that.”

How the engraving came to be in the possession of Solomon Drowne is still being researched; his descendants have some theories. And its monetary worth is probably only a few thousand dollars, but that is hardly what matters.

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"Advanced Chess" Leon 2002

About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...